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Workplace issues

Stress Control: Identifying rational and irrational causes of angst

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Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the university is keeping us on through December instead of closing our office, as expected, on June 30? Shouldn’t I be delighted that we all come and go at will, unmolested, and that we’re all being paid for many more hours than we really put in? What, I keep wondering, is the cause of the stress I feel about the job? Have I slipped my trolley? Is there any real reason to hate this job so much I don’t even want to think about it, much less go and do it?

The stress spinning off this resentment keeps me awake at night, causes me to grind my teeth, and drives me to drink. (Okay, not much drink…but for me, two glasses of wine or beer every single day is about 1.5 glasses too many.)

Last night I sat down with a pad of paper and started listing every reason I could think of, sane or not, that might explain my loathing for GDU in general and for my job in specific. Didn’t expect much to come of it: at the outset, I figured my problem is simply unhappiness at being laid off and worry about how I’m going to get by in retirement that will start about six years sooner than planned.

The result surprised me. At the outset, the list consisted of petty, stupid things that really don’t matter much: being rusticated to a decrepit building that was called out of condemnation for no discernible reason; the enduring stench of chemicals used to remove asbestos nine months ago, fumes that have never fully dissipated; some SOB from FacMan turning the thermostat as high as it would go (!) and then bolting the cover to the wall. I mean, really: get over it!

But as I was scribbling these things on paper, more serious issues arose:

• It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy to accept a full-time salary for doing practically nothing. Profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy.

• I’m bored stupid on the campus. Reading academic copy is not one whit more fascinating than reading freshman comp papers; it’s just a variant on boredom.

• I dislike the fraudulence of many degree programs offered not just by GDU but by universities in general. We’ll refrain from naming these, for obvious reasons, but let us observe that too many undergraduate and graduate programs take students’ money and give them precious little in return. Some courses of study turn out graduates with neither the learning and critical thinking skills a traditional liberal arts degree should cultivate nor a salable vocational skill. We have professional programs that turn out not professionals but dunderheads. Although GDU, like most large public universities, does have many highly worthwhile programs, it no longer is easy for a student to distinguish between a worthy program and an academic scam. I don’t like working for an institution that generates much of its income from questionable products.

• And speaking of fraudulence, I’m unhappy with the discovery, made in the course of doing my job, that about 95 percent of academic “research” and publication is unmitigated bullshit, and I resent being made an accomplice to that variety of institutional fraud.

Finally, as the hour grew later and I was nodding off to sleep over the notebook, the real cause of my nausée about the job surfaced. Several years ago an incident occurred whose details I can’t describe here. Suffice it to say that as a result of my doing something my dean had approved, I pissed off an über-dean, who, in a highly actionable way, shafted a woman I had hired. So actionable, in fact, that I gave her the name of a barracuda lawyer and advised her to sue the university. Had she done so, she would be corresponding with us from the Riviera, where she would be enjoying the life of Riley.

What this guy did was so crushing and so demoralizing that at the time I made a considered decision never again do anything even remotely entrepreneurial for the university. Bear in mind: I was hired because of my proven entrepreneurial track record and led to believe my job was not only to establish an office unique in the Western hemisphere but to grow it into a significant enterprise. I decided that I would allow the office to perform the work it had claimed for itself—nothing more—and that I would keep as low a profile as possible. Indeed, I would do as little work as possible, given the kind of appreciation my work had elicited.

There it was: I’ve hated my job ever since that happened. And there’s nothing even faintly irrational about it.

Over the past three or four years, I’ve pushed the incident out of my consciousness. But it hasn’t gone away. The guy pulled a nasty stunt on me and on an innocent bystander, and he should have been canned. In fact, a year or so later he was evicted from that particular über-deanship and shoved laterally into a less influential (but still highly paid) position. A day late, we might say, and a dollar short.

What can I do about this?

Probably nothing. I can’t undo what happened four years ago, and I can’t change the disaffection the incident created. There’s not a thing anyone can do to repair the damage that was done to me and to our operation, and even if there were, it’s too late now.

Still, when I awoke this morning I felt a lot better. Identifying the causes of distress and recognizing that at least one of them is in no way unreasonable helps to create perspective. At least I know I’m not crazy: I really do have good cause to feel some anger and resentment.

Should you put things like this behind you? Well, obviously. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll drive yourself nuts. But you can’t put an issue behind you until you know what it is. I knew what this one was a long time ago but deliberately neglected it. That probably was a mistake: given that there was no recourse within the institution, I should have left the job as soon as possible. “Putting it behind me” without taking action on it was like burying radioactive waste in a vegetable garden.

Putting a problem behind you probably needs to include doing something, no matter how minimal, to resolve the issue: physically getting away from it, confronting its cause, asking for redress, or finding a way to undo harm that has been done. It may be that you must do something about an issue before putting it to bed; otherwise, you risk chronic angst whose real cause grows more and more undefinable as the years pass.

What about you? Have you encountered an issue that came to affect your thinking, your attitude toward life, or your well-being? How have you dealt with it?

Missing unemployment payment accounted for

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Okay, so we’re all sitting in this auditorium jam-packed with furloughed Great Desert University employees, listening to the HR people and a couple of gurus from Department of Economic Security telling us how we can access the unemployment insurance that is supposed to cover the twice-monthly furlough days. 

At one point, the DES guy says, “You’ll get a debit card, and your benefits will be deposited to this debit card.”

A groan rises from the audience and fills the hall.

“Oh, I guess you don’t care for debit cards?”

No joke, says someone. 

So, can we ask to have a check sent to us or to get direct deposit? someone else asks.

“Yes,” he says, “you can ask for direct deposit by going to the Web site, downloading a form, filling it out, and sending to DES along with a canceled check. But the first payment defaults to the Chase debit card, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

We will, we’re given to understand, either have to spend the money on the debit card at retailers or go to an ATM or the bank and ask to have it in cash. But, we’re told, we must be careful, because Chase has a number of gotchas, and will charge fees for any number of arcane reasons. Read the paperwork that comes with it carefully.

Ducky.

I filled in the forms to claim unemployment, and within a couple of weeks a debit card arrived. At first, it developed, no money was on it because DES sent the cards out before they even got the data on ASU’s employees; since the agency is not online, it would take several weeks to manually keyboard information on several thousand furloughed employees. Eventually, enough time passed that I started to see the requested direct deposits appear in my checking account, so I figured the initial deposit must be there; all I wanted to do was retrieve it and move it into savings, there to wait for the day in December when I will be canned.

After several frustrating tries, I finally gave up. It simply would not disgorge the money, and no one at two different branches knew why or what to do about it. 

So, I mailed the damn thing to DES and asked them to return whatever money they’d put on the card to the federal government, to whom it belonged.

LOL!

Weeks later, along comes this message from an assistant director at that august agency:

The week ending February 7, 2009 was your mandatory, nonpaid waiting week. Your next Shared Work week was the week ending February 21, 2009; this was the first paying week of your Shared Work benefits. Because your employer’s certification for that week [was?] on March 16, 2009, the order to move your benefit payments from your debit card to your bank account had already taken place on March 9, 2009. [Is there logic here? Where?] The benefit payment was not made to your debit card, but to your bank account on March 17, 2009. The reason your Chase debit card could not pay your $48.00 is because no funds were ever put into that account.

Reason is because…oh, God, I hope you were never in one of my required writing classes…

That distraction aside, why on earth did DES tell us that the first payment would default to the debit card, no matter what, no questions asked, no rebellion brooked? But then…what on earth does this person’s message mean, anyway: GDU asked that I be paid on March 16, and so DES paid me on March 9? Hey: who needs to be online when you’ve got a crystal ball?

WhatEVER. Apparently giving away the debit card was giving away nothing.

Bureaucracy redux

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So I got up at 5:00 this morning to do a job I’ve been putting off: the community college district sent, to everyone who has applied for a job there, a notice that if you want to stay in the system you have to go back to the HR site and re-enter all the data you’d already uploaded. They’ve made some sort of change, and in doing so erased everyone’s data and required everyone to jump through their endless set of hoops again. This considerate move apparently comes to us courtesy of PeopleSoft, the bureaucracy’s bureaucracy. 

It took an hour and forty minutes to complete the needless, pointless chore. I quit early because the system would not allow me to upload the hideous, endless “CT” document: a form in which you have to enter every…single…college…course you have ever taken. Lower-division, upper-division, and graduate. D’you know how many courses you end up taking in pursuit of a Ph.D.????? This thing consumed over two hours the first time I did it, and I will be damned if I’m going to waste another two hours doing it all over again. 

In addition to typing each course number, course title, number of credits, semester, and year of every course you’ve ever taken in your life, you also have to turn in official transcripts, rendering the stupefyingly time-wasting list redundant. 

Maybe they’ve decided to give up on that stunt. Probably not, though: they still have the blank form posted for you to download. 

What excuse is there for PeopleSoft? Its metafunction evidently is demonstrate that employers do not give one thin damn about their workers: any company or institution that would offload HR and payroll tasks to an outfit that treats people this way cannot wish any good to its employees.

LOL! Someone once said that “bureaucracy exists to serve itself.” What on earth it’s serving remains to be seen!

Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money 

Fight a-brewing over COBRA

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Whatever it is, GDU makes it hard. Yesterday evening I discovered they’ve got a way to do people who are forced to take early retirement out of the reduced, marginally affordable rate for COBRA.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 mandates that employees who are canned involuntarily are to pay only 35 percent of the usual exorbitant COBRA premium; the remaining 65 percent is to be reimbursed to the employer by the government. Assuming the State of Arizona keeps its current healthcare plans at the next open enrollment (decidedly not a foregone conclusion!), my COBRA cost would drop from $488 a month to $171. This will make it affordable for me to continue my medical insurance coverage between December, when I’m to be thrown out on the street, and May, when I will be eligible for Medicare.

I wanted to confirm this. GDU’s HR page says nothing about the ARRA reduction. So I sent a message through HR’s faceless e-mail form asking what exactly the deal is with the reduced COBRA rates. They will not answer the telephone over there, so the only ways you can get an answer to a question are either to go in person to their office, which is far off-campus and requires you to move your car and park in a lot decaled off-limits to visitors, or to go through the e-mail form and wait about a month for an answer.

This is the same bunch, bear in mind, that told me if you are laid off, you’re not entitled to your RASL benefits, which for me amount to a severance package worth about $20,000. RASL is a program that pays retirees as much as 50 percent of their hourly wage for each hour of accumulated sick leave; the state GAO’s page is not accessible because it’s been posted in a program that Safari and Firefox can’t read. On the West campus, HR employees gave La Maya the same story. Turns out they were dispensing wrong information.

So finally, late last week ago along comes an e-mail from an HR underling, probably a student worker, referring me to the same HR page that contains not one word about the ARRA reduction for COBRA. So I responded to her form message and pointed out that there’s a new law providing a cut in COBRA costs but HR’s page says nothing about it. She didn’t have a clue.

Yesterday I get a snippy e-mail from someone else over there referring me to a State of Arizona web page. Notice that neither of these women so far has answered my basic question: what will the reduced premium on the EPO plan be? This is not hard, is it? Just confirm that the regular COBRA premium is $488/month and that ARRA applies. They don’t want to talk to you. They just want to send you through punch-a-button phone mazes or to the Internet.

So, while I’m navigating their incredibly complicated and only marginally comprehensible site, what do I come upon but this statement, hidden in a link under the FAQs, which appear at the bottom of the page:

Are retirees eligible for premium assistance?
No, retirees are not eligible for premium assistance. Former employees eligible for retirement should consider how delaying pension benefits (for the purpose of being eligible for premium assistance) would impact their participation in the Retiree Accumulated Sick Leave (RASL) Program.

Say WHAT?!?

To get the reduced COBRA, you have to forego your retirement benefits and evidently lose your chance to collect your RASL benefit!!!!!  (Understand: You have 14 days after your last day to claim your RASL. Fail to collect promptly, and you lose it.)

Of course, I came across this about 9:00 at night. So this morning as soon as state offices open, I’m going to have to get on the phone to the few people I’ve found downtown who will actually speak to you. There’s a woman at the General Accounting Office who hates GDU’s HR circus and who will give you a straight answer. I also have to drive my car out to Tempe, instead of taking the train, because I’ll have to go in person to HR and make an appointment to join one of the pending retirees’ classes so I can ask about this there.

It gets better! 

Continuing to explore the Internet, I went to the Department of Labor, where I found a link to an Internal Revenue Service document on the subject of COBRA premium assistance. Way, way down in this memo, on page 19, this interesting statement occurs:

The effect on eligibility for the premium reduction of an offer of retiree coverage that is not COBRA continuation coverage at the same time that COBRA continuation coverage is offered depends on whether the retiree coverage is offered under the same group health plan as the COBRA continuation coverage or under a different group health plan. If offered under the same group health plan, the offer of the retiree coverage has no effect on an individual’s eligibility for the ARRA premium reduction.

The State’s retiree health plans are exactly the same as the ones offered to employees. The cost to retirees is the same as the full cost of COBRA: exorbitant and unaffordable. 

So, apparently, the State of Arizona’s policy on the COBRA relief directly contradicts federal rules. No doubt they’ll have some way to to claim the four identical healthcare insurance plans are magically “different” because they’re offered to retirees.

Unless this is straightened out between now and December, I’m going to have to do battle over that. The feds have an appeal process for those who are denied:

ARRA provides an individual who requests and is denied treatment as an assistance eligible individual with the right to a review of the denial, within 15 business days after the receipt of the application for review, by the Department of Labor (or the Department of Health and Human Services in connection with COBRA continuation coverage that is provided other than pursuant to ERISA).

No clue in this document, of course, as to where you go to lodge such a protest. So it promises to devolve into a great hassle.

If I have to pay the full COBRA gouge, it will cost me $2,500 to stay insured for the five months from the time I leave state service to the time I’m eligible for Medicare. That’s almost a full month’s salary! I’m setting that much aside from emergency savings, but jayzus! How do they expect people to eat?

And notice how complicated it was to find information that hints the State’s policy is wrong! The whole idea is to make it as difficult as possible to get the facts by blitzing you with tons of boilerplate that looks like it’s telling you something but that does not answer specific questions and then by refusing to respond to real-world questions either over the phone or by e-mail. Most people would have given up before they came across that IRS document, and precious few would have plowed through 19 pages of bureaucratese to find the relevant statement about retiree health plans. I didn’t do so, myself: I found it by using the Mac’s Searchlight function to track down the character chain “retire.” Even that took some doing, since “retire” appears 14 times in the document. I’d venture that not  many workers nearing retirement age would know to do that—especially not those in low-paying jobs that don’t require computer skills, the very workers who most need the COBRA reduction.

Why do you suppose GDU and the State of Arizona want to avoid letting employees know about the ARRA reduction of COBRA premiums? In theory, it’s no skin off their teeth: the federal government reimburses employers for the 65 percent reduction. It may be just flaming incompetence. Or it could reflect the state leadership’s doctrinaire right-wing dementia, which holds that anything having to do with government in any way is bad news and that workers should be made to work for the lowest wages and the fewest benefits possible. 

Whatever the reason, it looks like I’ll be spending the first few weeks or months of my enforced retirement in a battle royal with GDU and the State of Arizona. Wheeee! I can hardly wait.

Right-wing legislators, pushed to the wall, raise taxes

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LOL! What should I notice in today’s paycheck but a $13.43 pay cut?

So I enquire of our business manager…whazzat? She forwards the following:

State increases tax withholding rates


The Arizona state income tax withholding rates will increase effective May 1, 2009. ASU employees’ paychecks issued on May 8 will reflect the new tax rates mandated by Arizona Senate Bill 1185, which was signed into law April 9, 2009. The Senate bill amends the amounts required to be withheld for Arizona state withholding tax as a percentage of an employee’s federal withholding tax.

 

Between May 1 and Dec. 31, 2009, the withholding rates will increase. Between Jan. 1, 2010, and June 30, 2010, the withholding rates will decrease. Please consult your personal tax professional if you need further assistance.

Decreasing the withholding rate won’t help those of us who are to be canned on or before December 31, such as, say, moi. Given these chuckleheads’ rabid opposition to any kind of tax increases—and heaven forFEND any increases on the businesses here who help to keep this a right-to-work (for nothing) state—it certainly is inspiring. Notice how they get around admitting it is a tax increase by changing the old way the state figured taxes to a percentage of federal income taxes.

So in addition to the furloughs and layoffs, the kookocracy brings us yet another pay cut.

Should I bother with trying to save my job?

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So I’ve cooked up a proposal that has an outside chance of rescuing our office and saving my job. The idea is that my sidekick and I will go on nine-month contracts, which would save the university a bundle of money, and that we would have only one research assistant, who would be hired 10 hours instead of the more usual 20 hours a week, cutting the tuition reimbursement (the real cost of running our operation) by 50 percent.

I haven’t submitted this to Her Deanship yet. At the moment, I’m wondering whether I want to.

Why? I’m afraid the deans will like it. They might actually buy it. And that would mean I’d have to keep trudging to work at the Great Desert University for the next three to seven years.

Not that such a fate would be worse than death. No doubt it would be better to hang on to a regular income, complete with health insurance and accruing sick leave (for which I get paid at retirement), instead of cobbling together a living with Social Security, investment drawdowns, and part-time teaching gigs. On a nine-month salary, too, if I quietly taught freshman comp at the community college my total earnings would be significantly more than I’m making now.

But I’m beginning to feel pretty confident that I can survive quite nicely in Bumhood. Why on earth would I want to keep working at a place that houses my office in a condemned building that still (months later!) stinks of the solvent used in the most recent asbestos abatement effort? Whose air conditioning has not been turned on despite 97-degree heat? Where we have no drinkable water (vile stuff comes out of the taps) and no place to get it but the public bathroom? Where parking costs almost $900, and where raises (few and far between) are immediately taken away through various creative increases in “benefits” and ancillary gouges?

On the other hand, it’s a nice sinecure: I come and go when I please, and I sure don’t work very hard. But…without those RAs, my sidekick and I most certainly would be reduced to actually working. Heaven forfend.

It would be kind of irresponsible not to at least try to save our operation. It’s the only such office anywhere in the world, as far as we know. No other university has anything like it. And getting it established took years of politicking and lobbying on the part of faculty and some powerful deans and chairs. If there’s even a chance of rescuing it from the trashbin, I suppose it really would be lâche of me not to try.

On the one hand, I think the heck with them. On the other: Michael Crow is not the only person who works for the Great Desert University…neither is Categories Idle essays, Workplace issues 6 Comments